Eteria IRC Client

About Development

Working on EIRC has been a great experience, I've met some great people and I've even had the opportunity to work abroad because of this project. The reason why I'm dropping it is simple: it's been a long time since I've last used this piece of software myself. Besides that, most of the work that remains undone is related to GUI enhancements, many of which are very difficult to solve nicely with AWT; given that mainstream web browsers have been supporting Java 2 VM's for quite a while already, I myself would stand firmly in favor of Swing based Applets.

Development has been stalled for more than a year already. I feel it's not right to hide from the users I'm not involved in this project anymore. As the one and only developer, that means that the project is officially orphaned. Having said so, I'll be here on the look out for someone responsible to take over the project. Bear in mind I will ask for some kind of references, though.

As a last —unrelated— remark, if someone is looking for a responsible developer don't hesitate to contact me. I have an Argentinian passport and I'm willing to move abroad if the offer is interesting enough; extra points awarded for being in Germany, Sweden, Holland, Canada or Atlantis.

It's the short form for Eteria IRC Client. EIRC is an RFC 1459 compliant client program written entirely in Java using only version 1.1.x Java API, for compliance with current mainstream web browsers, without the need to download the Swing classes. IRC has been chosen as the protocol because of its widespread use, readily availability of a variety of servers and the moderate scalability it allows.

It was written because there was need for a free Java IRC client that was at the same time flexible and easy to extend, and that had a simple —yet complete— GUI. After searching the net, we found out that what was available at the time would just comply with one of the requirements, it was specially evident the lack of good GUIs. By now I've received lots of suggestions from the public out there which have been fundamental to make the client grow up to its current state, and I expect that phenomena to persist.

This program requires a version 1.1.x compatible Java Virtual Machine. Note that you can run EIRC outside of Applet context (ie. from a winDOwS or UNIX command-line). It's been successfully tested under the following environments: